


Sisyphus

by originally



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-08 13:43:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15931619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally
Summary: Sometimes it felt like David had to do everything himself. Over and over.





	Sisyphus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Masu_Trout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Сизиф](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17943245) by [azzy_aka_papademon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azzy_aka_papademon/pseuds/azzy_aka_papademon)



> Okay, so please bear with me here and suspend your disbelief on two fronts: a) that Sarif was one of the VIPs invited to attend the London Safe Harbour Convention and b) that time travel is a thing that can be done in the DX universe.

David lowered his champagne flute just in time to see Adam Jensen burst into the room through a secret door. Or maybe it was the normal door. David's vision had begun to go fuzzy around the edges. 

"Adam," he said, only mildly surprised. The man had a knack for getting into places he wasn't supposed to be. David had ensured that, after all. 

"Sarif." Though Adam's eyes were shielded, the note of panic in his voice was unmistakable. "Goddamn it, not you too."

David tried to respond, to reassure him, but the words stuck in his throat. 

His vision went red, and then black.  
  
*

"—London tonight as last minute preparations get under way for the most anticipated Safe Harbour Convention yet. Influential people from across the globe—"

David awoke with a sudden gasp, disoriented, as though he was breaking the surface after a long dive. He sat up in bed, slowly, letting Eliza Cassan's voice wash over him, before raising his hand to the base of his skull. The hard, metal implant he found there was so warm to the touch that he pulled instinctively away, though his carbon fingers could not burn. 

"Huh," he said out loud to his empty bedroom. "Son of a bitch. I guess it works."

The Sisyphus chip. Designed to cheat death by manipulating time streams to create a stable loop. One of his more out-there ideas, designed and built in secret and installed in no-one but himself. He had never been able to leave a design on paper, to resist a proof of concept, but he also never had the guts to put this one fully to the test. Now it seemed that someone had done it for him. What the hell had been in that champagne? And had Adam really been there? What was he mixed up in? David had been concerned about his former employee ever since the vidcall where Adam had told him about the experimental augs his doctor had found spliced into his system. The idea of others, especially that hack Orlov, installing their half-baked, shoddy workmanship into Adam under David's own precision engineering was... troubling. 

Well, none of that was important right now. Knowledge was power. David had always believed that. And, so armed, he would solve this problem. Save the day. That's what the Sisyphus chip was for, after all. Just don't drink the champagne. 

*

David stood at a window, champagne flute in hand, watching as some hulking brute with industrial augs held Adam by the neck, helpless. David turned away; this wasn't something he wanted to watch. He stepped delicately over the corpse of one of his fellow delegates to reach a chair and settled down in it, turning the flute around in his fingers to watch the bubbles rise. There was a commotion below. David downed the champagne. 

*

"—last minute preparations get under way for the most anticipated Safe Harbour Convention yet. Influential people—"

Eliza Cassan's voice pulled him to the surface once more. For a long moment, he lay on his back, contemplating. He needed to be strategic about this. Keeping Adam alive was an important consideration. His death hadn't happened the first time around; ergo, it was David's actions that had caused it. Perhaps—it could be that even his presence as an informed actor within the timestream was disruptive. Time was an uncharted area, for him or for anyone. The theories that existed here were abstract, cobbled together from thought experiments and back-of-the-envelope calculations done for fun by SI theoretical physicists at Friday night happy hour. He steepled his fingers together, frowning. He needed more data. A control group, of sorts. He could remove himself from the equation completely, let the timeline play out as it would have if he weren't there. 

He spent the day on edge, pacing the floor of his condo and staring down the bottle of whiskey perched on the corner of his desk. The radio was a constant drone, a background of useless trivia—but he daren't turn it off. The experiment wasn't complete yet. 

When the first rumble of an explosion sounded, far away across the river but unmistakable nonetheless, David's heart sank. He took a deep breath and tried Adam's infolink. There was ominous silence, before a computer-generated voice told him that the person he was attempting to contact was unavailable. 

So that answered that question. 

It took surprisingly little time to find a away up to the building's roof. David stepped forward to the edge, gazing out over the twinkling lights of London below. Everything seemed so small from up here. Toy-like. He wondered if this was what Adam had felt the first time he'd used the Icarus to leap into the unknown. Not that David had an Icarus installed, of course; that was kind of the point. He probably should have built a more accessible trigger into the Sisyphus. Ah, well. Lessons learned.

He stepped forward into open space.

*

"—the most anticipated Safe Harbour Convention yet—"

*

The problem with the loops was that they kept shifting. Whatever events David changed seemed to ripple out into a slew of unknown consequences, more random and unpredictable than he would have expected—though he'd read enough Bradbury as a boy that he probably should have expected this. He'd discovered many new and exciting ways to die, watched Adam be murdered more times than he could count, and begun to truly understand the meaning of the word loathe when applied to one Viktor Marchenko. He'd tried staying at home. He'd tried directly intervening in Adam's fight. He'd tried contacting the police and the army and Nathaniel Brown personally, but he hadn't managed to pull together a loop in which both he and Adam survived. Carrying the fate of this day, Atlas-like, on his shoulders was proving tougher than he had thought.

He'd started to wonder, idly, and then with a little more intent, whether his chip had been successful after all. If David had been a religious man, he might have speculated on the nature of purgatory. As a man of science, he entertained the possibility that he could be in a vegetative state, with all these different loops playing out inside his own head like some personal Grand Guignol. The idea was more comforting than it should have been. 

He was, perhaps, beginning to unravel. 

The thought had occurred several loops ago that nothing he did here had lasting consequences, so long as he reset the loop afterwards. Intellectually, of course, he had known this, but philosophically? Or morally? Unlike Sisyphus himself, bound to repeat the same onerous task for all of eternity, David could do something  _fun_.  But he'd give himself one last try to get it right, first. 

To begin with, the next loop played out very much like the initial one. David walked the now familiar halls of the Apex Centre and joined the other delegates in the conference room. Interestingly, however, no champagne arrived. Nor did Marchenko. David frowned, raising one hand to scratch the back of his neck as he half-listened to the speech Brown was making. Perhaps this would be the loop that he actually found out what the hell the deal was with Rabi'ah. 

And then a bullet hit Brown right between the eyes. 

David dived for cover amidst the screaming chaos. He scanned the room, further regretting with every passing second that he had never installed combat augs, or at least some kind of HUD. There were several more shots, and then the unmistakable, ringing awfulness of a concussion grenade going off. He yelled and closed his eyes, covering his ears with his hands in a futile effort to stop the pain. 

He became aware of someone tugging at his arms.

"Boss. David. Come on. I'm sorry about the grenade."

"Adam," he said slowly. "Did you kill them?"

"We have to get out of here," Adam said. "Marchenko wired the whole building to blow. We don't have long." 

He pulled David easily to his feet, but David stumbled dazedly into him. Adam caught him and steadied him, his touch firm on David's back. David was close enough to smell the sweat on Adam's skin. If he turned his head, he could press his lips to Adam's neck. It was such a small movement to make. 

"Boss," Adam said, pulling back to look at him. David leaned up and kissed him. 

Adam made a surprised noise against David's lips, stilling for several long seconds before kissing back. His beard rasped against David's skin and he tasted of smoke and blood and gunpowder. David wanted to devour him. 

 _Unravelling_ , he thought, distantly. But maybe not. He'd built Adam from the ground up with his own two hands. It was only natural for a creator to admire his creation, like a Renaissance sculptor crafting the perfect male specimen in Italian marble. This was his chance to sample without consequence. Not the use he'd had in mind for his chip, but David was nothing if not adaptable.

Adam seemed to loosen under his touch, to shed a little of his armour as he parted his lips for David's tongue. David pressed his advantage, surging forward, forcing Adam back until he hit the wall with a dull thud. David growled in the back of his throat. Adam was letting him call the plays, allowing himself to be manhandled instead of using all that augmented strength to throw David off. The thought of that made David's cock swell against the seam of his tailored trousers. Adam's hands were on him then, almost possessive, his cold, metal fingers digging into the meat of David's hips. David caught Adam's lips in another dizzying kiss. 

It was easy, after that, to let his hands wander. The hard planes of Adam's body were obscured by the bulk of his tactical suit, but David knew them anyway, could imagine them beneath his fingertips. Here, the ports for the Typhoon; here, the scar tissue; here, the junction of carbon and flesh. When he unzipped Adam's fly and took his straining cock in hand, Adam hissed in a breath. 

"Come on, son," David said. "Let me hear you."

Adam groaned and pressed his face against David's shoulder. 

They rutted against each other, desperately, with none of the finesse David would prefer to put into his sexual encounters. Then again, most of his sexual encounters didn't happen in the middle of a war zone. At least Adam would have forgotten this by tomorrow. That pricked his conscience—then Adam's augmented fingers found their way into David's pants and drove all other thoughts out of his head.

It took an embarrassingly short time to finish. 

David leaned against Adam as he caught his breath. Adam's arms tightened around him, rubbing circles on the small of his back. After a long moment he took a step back, looking Adam up and down. Plaster dust had settled in Adam's hair and David reached up to brush it away, feeling the bumps of cranial augs under his fingers as he slid his hand downwards to cup Adam's neck. 

Wait. 

"Adam—" David started, and then everything exploded. 

*

David reached over to the nightstand to cut off Eliza Cassan's useless chatter before flopping back onto the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Adam had a Sisyphus chip. He was sure of it. The location, the size, the feel of it beneath his skin; David had run his fingers over his own implant enough times in the past few days to be intimately familiar with it. 

How was that possible? No-one but him was supposed to know of its existence. 

He activated a voice call, not remembering the time difference until a disgruntled-sounding Frank Pritchard said, "Mr Sarif, it's 3am."

"Frank, could someone have hacked into my personal archive? Not the Sarif Industries data, my personal files."

"What? No. Not without me knowing."

"You're sure? This is important."

Frank made an unimpressed noise, though he sounded more awake now. "I'm sure. I set up multiple layers of encryption and more ICE than the Red Wings' arena. If someone so much as sniffed around the firewall, I would know."

"Alright." David said. He drummed his fingers against the mahogany of the nightstand. "Just humour me for a minute, Frank, will you? Check the locks."

"Yes, sir," Frank said. David could picture him rolling his eyes. "I'll call you back when I've checked."

The connection closed. David stood up and stretched, feeling his vertebrae align. There was an odd... not pain, but sensation of movement under his skin, stranger even than the phantom limb pains he'd experienced right after Panchaea. Getting blown apart left some odd sense-memories on the body, it seemed. Really he should be cataloguing these loops. This whole experience would make for a fascinating paper or ten. 

Some day. When he wasn't concerned about someone stealing the fucking tech. 

He was halfway through dressing, pulling on the same suit as usual, when Pritchard called back.

"You were right," he said, with no preamble. "I don't know how, but you were right. I checked the logs. They were fucking good and they hid it well, but someone has been in there."

"What did they look at?" David asked. He was afraid he already know the answer.

"The Sisyphus project. Looks like they accessed schematics, data, notes. Shit. All of it. I'm working on finding the breach and fixing it."

"Don't bother," David said, and cut off the call.

That was the how. The who seemed easy enough to answer as well. If Orlov could have made Adam a Titan aug, then he could have done this. But why Adam? What did they want with him?

Before he could think better of it, he opened a new vidcall. It rang for what seemed like minutes, until, just when he thought it was going to go unanswered, Adam appeared onscreen.

"Sarif," he said. His eyeshields were active and there was something oddly guarded about his demeanor. David hesitated, suddenly unsure of what he thought he knew.

"Adam, this might sound crazy but bear with me."

"You're in the loop as well," Adam said, flatly. Well, that answered that question. 

"Yeah," David said. "I didn't know you were in it too, not until I felt the chip." He gestured to the back of his neck with one hand. "How did you figure it out?"

"You never called me in the morning before," Adam said wryly. He raised his own hand. "You said chip. What chip? Why didn't I know about it? Ko— my doctor never found it."

"It's called the Sisyphus chip. I designed it as a... failsafe, of sorts," David told him. "A reset button, if you will."

"For death?" 

"In a manner of speaking," David said. 

"And you didn't know I had it," Adam said slowly.  

"Obviously. Or I would have— this last loop, I wouldn't have—"

"You thought I'd forget."

"You thought  _I'd_ forget!" David snapped back. "Anyway, Adam, that's not the point. The point is we're both here, we both know what's going on, and we need to get this whole day straightened out."

"That's what I've been trying to do."

"Well, that makes two of us," David said, and then, "hmm. Maybe that's the problem."

"You mean that we've both been changing things?" Adam said. 

"Exactly." The cogs had begun to turn in David's head, synapses firing with ideas a mile a minute. "We need to compare notes. Tell me everything you've tried so far."

"Everything?"

"Come on, Adam, work with me here. Think back to the first loop. What did you do?"

"I—" Adam began. He lifted a hand to run it through his hair, looking briefly away from the camera. When he looked back, he had retracted his eyeshields. "I tried to save Jim. Miller, I mean."

"Who?"

"My boss. At Interpol. The first loop, he got hit by the Orchid—"

"That's the stuff in the champagne?" David interjected. "The poison?"

"Yeah," Adam said. "I guess you're pretty familiar with it too."

"You could say that," David said, shuddering. He could almost still feel the wracking pain, the convulsions, the sensation of losing control of his arms, watching them as if from a distance, as if they belonged on someone else's body. Adam coughed, and David wondered what expression had just been on his face. 

"So after I had accepted that all this was really happening, I made sure that Jim didn't get dosed," Adam said. "Then you. It's been... surprisingly hard to keep you both alive."

He looked so haunted that David longed to reach out through the vid and put his hand on Adam's shoulder. "This Orchid," he said instead. "What do you know about it?"

"It's a bioweapon. It's supposed to be a replacement for Neuropozyne, but it doesn't do what they say. They—it was Megan. She's the one that made it." 

"Megan?" A Neuropozyne replacement, with Megan Reed involved—well, that explained some things. Damnit. The work with Adam's genes was supposed to be his. Not that he would ever say that to Adam. "How do you know all this?"

"I, uh, robbed a bank." 

David stared. Adam at least had the grace to look sheepish. "There's an antidote," he said. "VersaLife had it stored at Palisade Bank in Prague but they moved it somewhere else. That's what I did next—went to look for it."

"And did you find it?"

"No." Adam paused, closing his eyes briefly as if trying to remember something. "Then I tried one where I smashed all the champagne bottles but Jim got himself shot. I tried reaching the security chief before Marchenko, but I wasn't fast enough. I tried telling Jim what was happening, but he stood me down and made me stay behind with the shrink and watch the mission from the monitors. That one didn't end well for anyone."

"Alright," David said. He wasn't sure he wanted to know exactly how badly it had ended. "We need to make a plan. Marchenko is mortal, just like the rest of us. He must have a weakness."

"Apparently not all of the rest of us," Adam muttered. "Jesus, Sarif, it's like someone challenged you to see how far you could take the phrase 'playing god'."

Sarif again, now. It had been David when they'd touched, when David's hands had teased those sounds from Adam's lips. Now he just sounded resigned. "Adam—"

"Forget it. And Marchenko does have a weakness. His handlers fitted him with a killswitch. They called it Damocles' Sword."

"There's a name with flair."

"Yeah, I thought you'd like that," Adam said, his lips twitching. 

David magnanimously ignored the implied barb. "So, where is it?"

Adam shook his head. "I found it once but it's never been in the same place again. It must be somewhere in that building. I just don't know where."

"Well, that's a start. And two sets of eyes are better than one."

"Yeah," Adam said, "no offense, boss, but you're not built for stealth missions."

"Your faith in me is touching, Adam."

Adam laughed, a small, surprised sound that he quickly stifled. David felt himself smile in response. 

"I'll meet you at Apex," David said. "At least keep me posted. You might be surprised at how useful I can be."

"Sure," Adam said. He was quiet for a moment, then he nodded and the screen flickered to black. 

*

In the end, David turned out to be less than useless. He'd been wrong. All of his theories were wrong. This wasn't chaos. It was human. 

"Were you looking for this, Brother?" Marchenko said, holding aloft an object that looked like a Multi-Tool. Adam knelt on the ground before him, shaking his head as if to clear it as he tried to recover from an EMP blast. "I looked for it too, once before. But I found something else instead. I've had a lot of time to think about things recently. A lot of time. And now I finally understand that you have had a lot of time, too." 

He yanked Adam to his feet as easily as if he weighed nothing. David stifled his gasp instantly, not wanting to make a sound that could give away his hiding place. He fingered the grenade in his pocket. Not yet. Not yet. But this hadn't been in the plan. As he watched, Marchenko shook Adam like a ragdoll, tilting him forward to expose his neck. 

"Here," Marchenko said. He used his claw-like left hand to rip through Adam's flesh. 

Adam screamed, a high, awful sound that made every hair on David's body stand on end until it abruptly stopped. Marchenko dropped Adam to the ground and uncurled his bloody fingers to reveal his prize. A Sisyphus chip. 

"As I thought," Marchenko said, half to himself. "Vadya was generous to you, Brother. Clean work. I had to bribe some chop shop doctor in Útulek to install the one I found." He laughed and closed his fingers again. Mangled metal and plastic fell to the floor.  

"No!" The sound was torn from David against his will. He gripped the grenade like it was a baseball, stood from his hiding place, and pitched it overarm. Marchenko laughed as he brushed it aside, letting it skitter haphazardly across the floor where it incapacitated a security bot instead. His other arm was shifting, becoming something else. A plasma cannon. David ran. 

*

The sound of a vidcall coming through woke David before Eliza could. He sagged with relief when he saw who was calling; he had been so scared that he would have got this wrong. 

"Adam," he said. "You still remember."

"Marchenko has one of your damn chips," Adam growled. 

"Come on, Adam, you can't blame me for that," David said, raising his hands placatingly. He stood up, momentarily forgetting he was wearing only the boxers he had gone to bed in, what seemed like several months ago. Adam raised an eyebrow and David steadfastly refused to allow himself to flush. He grabbed his robe from the end of the bed, wrapping the cool silk around him. The specter of that loop seemed to hover between them, unspoken and unacknowledged. David wondered if Adam regretted it. 

He pulled himself together as the pause stretched out uncomfortably, and said, "On the bright side, I think I know how to stop him. Removing the chip won't be enough. He's proved that for us now."

"You never did make anything easy."

"Hey, I was thinking ahead. It works on a dead man's switch principle. I had to plan for all eventualities. Explosion, decapitation—"

"Right," Adam said, drawing out the word. "But you put in a way to turn it off?"

"Of course I did. What if I'd actually wanted to kill myself?"

Adam opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, and then seemed to think better of it. 

"There's a sequence embedded in the base code that will shut the whole thing down," David continued. "Marchenko stole his chip, so he probably doesn't know to change it. Hell, we know he doesn't, or you wouldn't remember enough to have this conversation right now. We just have to hope that his bosses didn't know enough either."

"How do we find out?"

"Well..." David said. "Either we try it and see, but we'll show our hand if it doesn't work. Or I take yours out and check."

"You mean you want to cut me open and root around under my skin again," Adam said flatly.

"Yeah. Sorry. It's not hooked up to your other systems." 

Adam sighed. "Give me a couple of hours to get there. I need to convince someone to fly me and I don't trust our pilot any more. That was... a fun loop."

He closed the connection without giving David the chance to respond. 

*

Adam arrived in a VTOL piloted by a Latin-looking woman with striped hair and accompanied by a man with a widow's peak and a surly expression. Both had conspicuous facial augs, and neither said anything as Adam hopped down onto the roof of David's building. 

"Who are your friends?" David asked.

"They owed me a favour," Adam said, and refused to be pressed further. "You know, there's still time to fly back to Prague. We could get my usual doctor to do this. He doesn't ask many questions."

"Stop being a baby," David said. "If I hit something vital, at least we can start over."

"Comforting," Adam said dryly. But he went inside the building all the same. 

David would have preferred to perform minor surgery on his former employee in a more sterile space than his bathroom, but needs must. In the mirror, David could see the sardonic smile Adam wore as he knelt on the tile and bared his neck to David. David applied numbing gel across Adam's skin. 

Adam hissed. "That's cold."

"Trust me, son, you'll thank me in five minutes."

Adam snorted. 

"What?"

"You always expect me to thank you," Adam said. 

David paused, his fingers hovering just above Adam's skin. "What do you mean? Adam, I just want what's best for you."

"I know," Adam said. He took a deep breath. "But you don't always consider what I want."

"Are you saying—the other day, what we did, are you saying you didn't want that?"

Adam sighed. "No. Never mind. Do what you need to." 

The scalpel sliced much more cleanly through Adam's flesh than Marchenko's fingers had. Adam barely flinched as David widened the cut, enough to see past the layer of dermal implants to his prize beneath. He disconnected the implant carefully, holding his breath despite his assurances to Adam. Once it was out, David fancied he could see Adam's augs kicking in, trying to close up the laceration before he bled out. He put the chip into the reader and waited for the numbers to scroll across the screen. Afterwards, in reverse, the procedure seemed to go quicker. Adam said nothing throughout. 

Finally, David was satisfied. He stripped off his bloody gloves and tossed Adam a hypostim from the medicine cabinet. "Here. Take this. Your Sentinel should have that wound healed in no time."

"Thanks," Adam said, raising his hand to feel the damage. He rinsed the blood off quickly under David's shower then moved to stand at David's shoulder as he parsed the code from the chip. "Well? What's the verdict?"

"I think we've got the bastard," David said.

Adam grinned. "Does that mean we can finally see tomorrow?"

"I goddamn hope so," David said. "Not that there haven't been some enjoyable aspects to this adventure, but I'm ready to move on."

For a moment, they just smiled at each other. Then Adam kissed him. 

This time, there was no hesitancy from either of them. Adam's hands were gentle where they cupped David's face. His tongue traced the seam of David's lips and David parted them for him, letting Adam take the lead. The kiss was leisurely, unhurried. He still tasted of cigarettes. 

All too soon, Adam was pulling back. "We don't have time," he said, regretfully. "And there's some stuff I want to talk to you about. But later."

"Let me see your neck," David said, instead of the myriad things he could have said. Adam turned obligingly and David traced his fingers over the faint red line. "Good. Looks like I didn't murder you after all."

"Never doubted it," Adam said. David laughed, and they made their way back to the roof and the waiting VTOL.

*

It turned out to be easier to convince Adam's boss—Miller—that Adam wasn't having a delusional episode when David was there to corroborate the story, though he still seemed bemused by their explanations. Once Interpol were on board, the whole prospect became infinitely simpler. 

David's scalpel sliced through Marchenko's flesh just as easily as it had Adam's, though he hissed and spat and swore much more than Adam had, despite the EMP bindings holding him helpless. David slipped the chip into an evidence bag and pocketed it as he watched Marchenko being led away by a team of burly special agents past a worried-looking Nathaniel Brown. 

"I'll let you know when I've finished deactivating it," David said, taking a step back from Miller as he strode over.

"I'm going to have to ask you to turn that implant over to us, Mr Sarif," Miller said. "It's evidence."

"It's my intellectual property," David said. "I might not have my company any more, Miller, but I sure as shit have enough resources to take you to court."

"Now, look here—" Miller started, but Adam stepped smoothly between them. 

"I'll keep an eye on him," he told Miller. 

David grinned to himself. It was nice to be the one to save the day. Maybe he would get the guy as well.


End file.
